Li-Chiʻang Chao Poetry Group

A 12th c. lyric poet, famous in her teens, and the first poet to write critically about Chinese poetry, wrote the inimitable translator and American poet Kenneth Rexroth. She was born into a Confucian family, met and married a rare young man, a University student, of the same social status and economic class. He shared her wide, wide interests in art, history, literature. Together they were without peer; alone, she was without peer. They came from rival political families and as the fortunes of one fell, the other rose; but, married in her late teens, when she was already fairly well known, she lived mainly alone, most of her married years because her husbandʻs Magistrate duties, under Confucian and imperial rules, required that he live far from home, in order to ensure he administer justice impartially. Over the years, from his sabbatical returns, they collected stones for the rubbings of early writings on them. They filled whole wharehouses, until the Chinese emperors fell, then the warlords that succeeded them. When the Tartars invaded China, the destruction and pillaging of entire buildings followed the scattering of populations and the decimation of the educated and devastation of the political and social imperial classes. Throughout the successive moves, Li-Chiʻang-Chao wrote. Her poems speak of the changes in the socio-political conditions that wiped out their yearsʻ long, hard work in art history. They speak especially of her unceasing longings to see her lover-artist-Magistrate husband. They speak of the loneliness when their families lost everything and each was left to their own keep, in destitution, like others, and finally in utter poverty. Li-Chiʻang -Chao died in her 83rd or so year, decades after never having heard of the love ofher life. In Rexrothʻss hands, the lyric vein struck, however it was in 12th c. Chinese, is remarkable here for freshness of the innovative use of words, given new turns of exquisite phrasings that could easily have turned the tragic into pathos. The translation into English is rich with subtleties of colours and of weights of sounds, coterminals of the senses of sorrow, doubt, desertion, struggling faith and under siege, the quality of love that remained -- exquisitely refined. Considering that Li-Chiʻang Chaoʻs poems are almost a thousand years old, the English translation bears an immediacy that is fresh, pure, light or heavy moving years of overbearing grief sliced by a tenacious love that is replete with grace, fragile and momentary yet stilled by the young wife who ages beyond knowing from suffering in ignorance of her beloved and family. She dies alone, waiting her loverʻs return, acknowledging the loss of their entire lifeʻs work, its value to history.

(The name Li-ChiÊ»ang Chao is spelled differently today, under the new linguistics order of the Peoplesʻ Republic of China.)